Seminar: Language acquisition in typologically different languages

Prof Sabine Stoll (University of Zurich) will give the first LuCiD seminar of 2017/18 on Language acquisition in typologically different languages. The seminar will take place from 11.00-12.30 on Tuesday 3rd October at the University of Manchester.

Abstract

Languages across the world differ to an extreme degree. What cognitive abilities are necessary to learn any of these languages? What are the structures in the input that make acquisition of such diversity possible? These are the major puzzles of language acquisition research, which ask for a radical comparative approach to make claims about language acquisition as a species-wide ability. Cross-linguistic acquisition research has made great progress in the last decades but so far, a comparative method that systematically incorporates variation has been lacking. In this talk I will present a new comparative method, the maximum-diversity approach, which systematically incorporates grammatical variation. This method provides us with a sample of languages with a wide a range of grammatical variation as possible to test for general acquisition principles and patterns in the input. I will present our latest result on input structures in 9 typologically extremely diverse languages of our database.